The Top Ten Security Threats for 2008 (Part 12)
Here is another top ten cyber security threat for 2008:
— Denial-of-service attacks.
Distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in cyberspace are one of the most difficult threats to defend against. Criminals or terrorists, for example, can use botnets to send a large number of queries or other malicious traffic to servers, effectively shutting them down. A successful, sustained denial-of-service attack against critical infrastructure, such as the DNS root servers, could potentially shut down the Internet.
The U.S. government once warned the American private financial services industry of a looming al Qaeda DoS attack against online stock trading and banking web sites. Blackmailers and extortionists often threaten DoS attacks against their victims and the threat of DoS attacks is very real for high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways and other critical infrastructure.
Denial-of-service attacks remain a serious threat in 2008.
Filed under: Cybersecurity, Intrusion Detection, Threats and Vulnerabilities
